Experiences from the Future

There is no doubt that humans gain a significant quantum of their knowledge from experience. Experience means learning from a specific situation which has happened in the past. Very often experience stands for recognizing faults and their potential causes. Such an experience can help to avoid similar faults in the future. If experience means learning from the past - how is it then possible to learn from the future for the present? The paradox "experience from the future" was promoted by the editors in the early 1990.s already. It has been adopted by the Fraunhofer Simulation Alliance in 1994 and became the leitmotiv of the ASIM Dedicated Conference on Simulation in Production and Logistics in the years 1998 and 2000 and then in 2004 again. The paradox points out the very specific point of simulation: this technique does not shape the optimal manufacturing system. Simulation provides engineers with the opportunity to gain experience from manufacturing systems which do not exist yet - which even might never become real, if the system concept does not prove to be successful. This book is intended to show recent methods and tools, which are applied for simulation, as well as successful industrial applications. The focus is on material flow studies in production and logistics, enriched by contributions on digital factory, digital mock-ups, project management, emulation, manufacturing execution systems as well as related topics like civil engineering and ticket purchasing.